


The Spark

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo Amnesty Fills [10]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (I'll elaborate in the author's note), Angst, Canonical Character Death, Drama, F/M, Holdo-Critical, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mild Blood, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Spoilers, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 08:39:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13655430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: It can light a fire, but maybe not one you meant to start. Established Poe/Connix, Sequel to Congratulate.





	The Spark

**Author's Note:**

> A little disclaimer before we start:
> 
> I recently got a look at the Visual Guide for the movie and found out that not only did Holdo _not_ let the crew in on her survival plan... She also brought in a bunch of her personally-handpicked officers, part of her inner-circle, with her when she took command after Leia; and the guide straight-up says that it contributed to the tension between Leia's original crew and Holdo, because it's implied she stuck mainly with her people while they got frozen out.
> 
> And it tickled my interest, since it added more context for why the mutiny took place beyond the motivation we see from Poe.
> 
> As such: This story is going to tackle the topic of why Lt. Connix (and others) joined Poe's mutiny.
> 
> And that means that Holdo and some of her actions are going to be criticized- I portray Connix as being kind of pissed off in this story, whereas Poe is more forgiving (it's post-canon, so they're looking back on everything that's happened). This is not meant to be a condemnation of Holdo; nor is it meant to be a vindication of everything that Poe did in the movie. It's meant to be an explanation for why Connix and other members of the crew mutinied with Poe, and yes, that does require me to criticize Holdo and her actions a bit. 
> 
> If this troubles you, the correct response would be to hit the back-button.
> 
> The incorrect response would be to start making asshole character-bashing comments.
> 
> Because this is a character-bashing-free zone; you mindlessly bash a character, whether it's Poe or Holdo (reasonable, level-headed criticism is fine, the keyword here is civility), and your comment is getting deleted. I am not going to debate with you, and I'm not going to give you the pleasure of debating with any other commenters either. You can take that shit to the billion other websites dedicated to Star Wars.
> 
> And I don't think I need to tell you what's going to happen to anybody stupid enough to get personal with their insults.
> 
> Be chill. That's all I'm asking, and really, I don't think that's asking too much.

“No, really, how are we still alive?”  
  
Poe forced his eyes open, and it took him an extra moment of deliberate concentration to find Kaydel’s head still resting on his thigh. “Mhm?”  
  
“How are we still alive? We survived D’Qar, we survived being picked off by the First Order once, then we survived it again, and then we managed to escape from Crait. How the hell is it that you and I are still alive?”  
  
“Sheer, dumb luck,” Poe muttered, keeping his voice down even though none of the other Rebels had set up camp near them. The injured had been given first go at the bunks in the Millennium Falcon, and so Poe and Kaydel had taken up residence on a section of floor, with Poe leaning against the wall, and Kaydel lying with her head on his lap.  “I guess, anyways. Or the Force just likes us. Or it likes you, anyway.”  
  
Kaydel turned slightly, one dark eye looking up at Poe. “Don’t do that.”  
  
“Don’t do what?” Poe asked absently.  
  
“Don’t do that. Don’t do that _thing_ you do whenever someone criticizes you, where you start thinking you’re the worst person in the galaxy and start questioning every breath you’ve ever taken. You’ll start spiraling and given your mental state, I’m not sure you can handle that right now.”  
  
Poe rubbed his eyes. “Whatever.”  
  
Kaydel grabbed his wrist and met his gaze. “See, this is what I mean: You’re not even arguing with me, you’re just taking it.”  
  
“Maybe I’m not in the mood for an argument. Maybe I’ve had enough fun pissing people off in the last few days; maybe I’m done for now.”  
  
“You’re getting angsty over Holdo, aren’t you?”  
  
Poe’s spine stiffened at the Admiral’s name, over the guilt it evoked; the Dreadnaught, his rush to judgment, his ill-fated mutiny, the fact that Rose and Finn had been in danger for no reason at all. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to hear her name now without a reflexive pulse of shame as how badly he’d handled everything. His elbow resting on Kaydel’s side, he began half-consciously picking at his nails. It had been a nervous tic since he was a kid, and after the last week of utter bullshit, he felt somewhat justified in falling back on it as a coping mechanism now.  
  
“Don’t see what the point of it is- she was just as willing a participant in that clusterfuck as we were.”  
  
“She had a plan the whole time, Kay,” Poe mumbled. “We jumped on her too quickly. I was stupid to suggest a mutiny- it was going too far.”  
  
Kaydel rolled so that she was looking directly up at Poe, eyes squinted critically. “If I thought you were doing something completely, baselessly stupid, do you honestly think I would have hesitated to tell you?”  
  
“No.” Kaydel wasn’t good at sugarcoating. Poe could count on one hand the times he’d heard her lie, and it was because she more often than not couldn’t be bothered to soften her words or tell little white lies, even to people she cared for.  
  
“So are you suggesting that I joined your mutiny because I’m stupid?”  
  
“No, you joined because-”  
  
Poe stopped midsentence. It would be a bad, _bad_ idea to suggest that Kaydel had joined the mutiny for no other reason than her loyalty to him, even though most would see their relationship as an obvious reason.  
  
She seemed to take his silence as confirmation.  
  
“You weren’t on the Bridge with us, Poe,” Kaydel whispered, fire in her eyes. “You didn’t see how she brought her little friends, her little inner-circle onto the Bridge and froze the rest of us out. Leia was really sick, possibly dead, and we had these strangers we didn’t know and didn’t trust giving us our orders. You didn’t see how she whispered behind the backs of the people who have been serving so loyally under Leia for years, all after this bullshit _oh we’re all rebels, we all need to work together!_ shtick. I didn’t mutiny because I care for you; I mutinied because that woman gave me no reason to trust her, or to think that she had any reasonable way of getting us away from the First Order alive. If she had spoken to _any_ of Leia’s people about her plan- hell, if she’d even told us she _had_ a plan, she didn’t have to give us all the details- this wouldn’t have had to happen, and I’m not going to rip myself up over something she could have stopped from the beginning.”  
  
Kaydel plopped her head back down onto Poe’s lap and did not say anything else.  
  
Poe waited, and then gently set his hand back down on her shoulder. “I’m sensing you took it even more personally than I did.”  
  
Kaydel was quiet for a moment, but then she said, “I can understand why she would freeze you out- Leia demoted you, and Holdo was pissy about the Dreadnaught.”  
  
“For good reason.”  
  
“I and several other people find that debatable.”  
  
“Okay.” She shook her head, exasperated, and Poe said, “I didn’t realize you liked me arguing with you so much.”  
  
“I don’t like when we argue- I like when you _challenge_ me. I like when you have the balls to speak up when you feel something’s wrong, even when everyone may disagree with you. I like that you’re not some mindless droid who just takes every questionable order without a peep of protest-”  
  
<LIEUTENANT CONNIX SAID WHAT?>  
  
Kaydel rolled her eyes. “I said _mindless_ , BB-8; you’re not mindless in any sense of the word.”  
  
<LIEUTENANT CONNIX SHOULD WATCH WHAT SHE SAYS.>  
  
Poe snorted. “My droid’s challenging you, do you like that?”  
  
“I’m happy for any challenge that has an ounce of sense behind it. I didn’t join the Resistance so I could mindlessly follow orders.” Kaydel’s fingers dug into the fabric of Poe’s pants. “That’s my point, Poe: I’ve never been okay with that. How many people in the First Order do you think justify themselves by saying ‘I’m just doing what I’m told’, whether it’s constructing a planet-killer or gunning down civilians. Holdo came in, froze out Leia’s officers, had _no plan_ that she was willing to discuss with us, wasn’t even willing to let on that she _had_ a plan that she was working on, and we’re the bad guys for having a problem with that? We’re the bad guys because we didn’t follow orders that made no sense, that we thought were going to lead to us all being _killed?_ ” She shook her head, a few hairs coming loose from one of her buns. “Your plan with Finn and Rose may not have panned out, but at least you _had_ something, which is more than Holdo gave us.”  
  
“You’re being too hard on her. She wasn’t as bad as we thought she was, we just…” He didn’t want to project his own regrets onto Kaydel, especially since it was obvious that she was still holding a grudge. “…We moved too quickly. We should have given her more chance to explain.”  
  
“And you’re cutting her too much slack because she martyred herself, and you feel bad about it. You’re looking back at her and everything she did with rose-colored glasses because you feel bad that she’s dead. She allowed a ship full of people to think we were on the edge of annihilation with no hope of survival, not bothering to consider that we may have found that a little _frightening,_ and then had the gall to be surprised when we _did_ something about it. I’m not happy she’s dead, but I’m also not going to deify her for what she did either. Not when she had the answer to the problem the whole _damn_ time and refused to tell us. She let us think we were all doomed, Poe, and if you know a good reason why she did it I’d love to hear it, because I don’t have one.”  
  
Poe heard a crack in Kaydel’s usually steady voice, which had grown louder as she’d spoken, and he curled his arm around her. “Shhh,” He murmured, bending down awkwardly to kiss the side of her head. “It’s fine. Things are okay now.”  
  
But she nearly broke his nose with how quickly she sat up, pulling away from him so that she could look at him directly. When she locked eyes with him, he could still see the fire in hers- fire and the beginnings of tears. “No, Poe, it’s not okay now,” Kaydel hissed. “The Resistance is down to its last fighters. We may never reach the numbers we once had again, the First Order is going to be hunting us down like dogs, and _you_ -” she jabbed him in the chest with a finger. “-are one of our remaining officers, and you’re losing your fire.”  
  
“Maybe I _need_ to lose my fire. Do you know how many people I’ve gotten killed in the last few days?”  
  
“You mean the people who followed your orders even after they heard Leia order you to turn back?” Kaydel snapped. “The ones who, by agreeing to follow you into the attack, _also_ directly disobeyed her orders? You may have made a bad call, Poe, but dial back your ego- they made their own choices, they were _just_ as eager to attack the Dreadnaught as you were. Not everything is your fault, however much you want to think it is.”  
  
“Why would I want to think everything’s my fault?” Poe snapped. “It _sucks_ , Kaydel, I don’t like feeling like this at all.”  
  
“Because,” Kaydel retorted coolly as she sat up and started undoing her buns, “If everything’s your fault, then it’s also within your ability to fix it. You don’t like the idea that there are things that _aren’t_ within your control to fix, and that maybe, _maybe_ , when you get criticized, you don’t need to revamp your entire way of thinking because you feel guilty that you made a mistake.” She pulled the pins loose and her hair fell around her shoulders. “But whatever, Poe: If you want to beat yourself up over Holdo, go right ahead; but don’t expect me to kiss her ass because she’s dead, not after spending, at minimum, an hour in the ‘fresher puking from the anxiety of knowing that I was going to die without saying goodbye to my parents and trying to find a way to say goodbye to _you_ \- only to find out that she had a plan to save us the whole damn time.”  
  
“Kay,” Poe said weakly.  
  
“Just answer me one question,” Kaydel said, sitting on her knees in front of Poe, eyes dry now. “Just one, and I’ll have mercy on you and end the conversation.”  
  
“I’d do a lot of things for that right now,” Poe grunted.  
  
“Good: Are you psychic?”  
  
Poe’s eyes rolled shut. “ _Kaydel._ ”  
  
“Answer me: Are you psychic? Are you Force-Sensitive and haven’t told me? Did you somehow magically intuit that Holdo had the situation completely under control, that she had some semblance of a plan, and none of us were at _any_ risk of death? At literally _any_ point during this entire _episode_ did you have any reason to trust Holdo to save us, before you woke up on the transport and found out about Crait?”  
  
Poe rubbed his eyes. “No, Kaydel, I didn’t. But that doesn’t really change the fact that I still fucked up.”  
  
“Yeah, you did,” Kaydel said without missing a beat. “So did I. So did everyone else who participated in this. You want me to hate myself, Poe?”  
  
“Never.”  
  
“Good. So you fucked up- take it in. Learn from it. But don’t think that you need to rework your entire understanding of the universe and your place in it because of Holdo.” She looked away for a moment, fingers toying with one of the pins she’d pulled from her hair. “I’m not saying you have to hate her. That’s my- I don’t hate her, but I’m still _furious_ about some of the things she did, Poe, and that’s not going away anytime soon.”  
  
“You hold a grudge like no other woman I’ve known,” Poe said dryly, and Kaydel kicked him. “It’s a compliment!”  
  
She shook her head. “I’m saying, you don’t need to hate yourself over this. Not when Holdo deserves a share of the blame for how things turned out too. Don’t lose your fire, don’t douse it because you feel guilty that you made a bad move, because we’re going to need it now more than ever. You can’t kill yourself like this every time you make a bad call, Poe. You can’t- do things like _this._ ”  
  
Kaydel grimaced and picked up his hand. Poe had been picking at his nails idly during the whole conversation, and he hadn’t even realized they’d begun to bleed until she’d brought it to his attention. “Yikes. That’s not good.”  
  
She fixed him with a dark look. “The literal moment I am able to drag you to a psych, you’re getting a full evaluation whether you want one or not. If I have to bribe them into making you rest, or take medicine, I will.” She turned to BB-8, who’d been charging nearby. “BB, do you have anything medical tucked away in there?”  
  
<BB-8 DOES NOT HAVE ANYTHING. RETRIEVE?>  
  
“Yes, please.”  
  
BB-8 rolled away around the corner, and Poe could hear him beep indistinguishably a moment later; it wasn’t as though he had far to travel, given their close quarters. Kaydel kept a firm grip on his hand until BB-8 returned, like she thought he’d keep picking if she didn’t physically stop him from it; and given the stress he was currently under, that was a pretty realistic possibility.  
  
“Thank you,” She muttered when BB-8 came back clutching a bottle of disinfectant in his claw, and a roll of cloth bandages stuck on his antenna. It stung when she dabbed the disinfectant around his fingers, but the pain had nearly the same cathartic factor that picking them had, and Poe wasn’t as bothered by it as he might have been otherwise. “Check these later, make sure they aren’t infected.”  
  
“Yes, dear.”  
  
Kaydel fixed him with a flat look. “Take your jacket off.”  
  
Poe gave a small gasp. “ _Kaydel_. We have _witnesses._ ”  
  
“Just take it off, smartass.” Poe did as requested, wincing as he tried to grasp the fabric with sore fingers, handing it to Kaydel. She folded it, and then set it on the floor- a pillow. “Come on.” She pulled him by the shoulder until he was lying down beside her, guiding his arm to lie over her waist. “Now go to sleep.”  
  
“Don’t know how successful I’m gonna be at that.”  
  
“Try.”  
  
Poe huffed a laugh and shut his eyes, forehead brushing against Kaydel’s back. After a moment of silence he said, “I like that you challenge me too.”  
  
“You’d better, because it’s just going to keep happening.”  
  
“I’m alright with that.” Pause. “I love you.”  
  
Kaydel was quiet for a long moment, and then whispered back, “I love you too. Go to sleep.”  
  
Poe did his best to push everything else out of his mind, focusing on the slow rise and fall of Kaydel’s back against his head, the smell of her, the feel of her in his arms, and eventually fell asleep to the sounds of the Falcon around him, his anxiety slowly draining away.  
  
Maybe tomorrow things wouldn’t look so bleak.  
  
Maybe tomorrow he wouldn’t feel so terrible.  
  
But if he did, at least Kaydel would be there to shake him out of it.  
   
-End

 


End file.
